Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday February 29, 2012 @02:16PM
from the it's-the-end-of-the-net-as-we-know-it dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Internet freedom and innovation are at risk of being stifled by a new United Nations treaty that aims to bring in more regulation, Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt has warned. In a question-and-answer session at Mobile World Congress 2012 on Tuesday, Schmidt said handing over control of things such as naming and DNS to the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU) would divide the internet, allowing it to be further broken into pieces regulated in different ways. 'That would be a disaster... To some, the openness and interoperability is one of the greatest achievements of mankind in our lifetime. Do not give that up easily. You will regret it. You will hate it, because all of a sudden all that freedom, all that flexibility, you'll find it shipped away for one good reason after another,' Schmidt said. 'I cannot be more emphatic. Be very, very careful about moves which seem logical, but have the effect of balkanising the internet,' he added, urging everyone to strongly resist the moves."

It's good fantasy. Look at Star Trek: The Next Generation, for instance. Usually called "science fiction", and derided as "fantasy" as some "hard sci-fi" fans because it has FTL travel and other such technologies, the REAL reason TNG is "fantasy" is not because of its depiction of technology, which is perfectly reasonable if you don't believe that we primitive humans who've barely even left our own planet can possibly understand the laws of physics well enough to know what is and isn't possible. No, the reason TNG is fantasy is because it shows humans (and other similar, humanoid beings) in a society where most people do what they're supposed to, are highly competent at their jobs, and aren't constantly stabbing each other in the back. The people running Starfleet, for instance, mostly seem to do a very good job, instead of bankrupting the Federation on massively overpriced weapons systems in exchange for bribes or "campaign contributions" or pushy positions at the defense contractors. The captain and first officer of the ship are extremely competent, and save the ship (not to mention various populations of beings on planets, and sometimes the entire Federation) from hairy situations time and time again, rather than making blundering errors and causing catastrophe. Also, their depiction of human-made technology, particularly computers, is completely fantastical: their technology is simply too reliable, instead of being filled with all kinds of dumb UI errors, bugs, various systems that are incompatible with each other, etc. Such technology is certainly physically possible, but the idea of humans making that technology is utterly ridiculous.

But all this is why it's so fun to watch this show: it shows human society as we wish it would be, rather than as it really is. The reality is simply too depressing, and it's nice to shift your mind into an escapist fantasy where people work for the common good, where technological items are well-designed and work properly all the time, where human organizations mostly work well instead of being completely mired in corruption, and where people aren't generally incompetent and lazy. Because in the real world we live in, nothing works that way. Computers are always having some kind of annoying problem, you can't go to any retail shopping place without running into tons of incompetent morons, and the leadership of all human societies is generally corrupt or incompetent or both.

Also, their depiction of human-made technology, particularly computers, is completely fantastical: their technology is simply too reliable, instead of being filled with all kinds of dumb UI errors, bugs, various systems that are incompatible with each other, etc.

A lot of the reason is political. Those groups tend to have a left-wing bent and the UN is favored more by the left than the right, and some people have an ideological belief in a one world government (crazy rightwingers are right on this, but it's not a conspiracy so much as a shared belief). But global democracy is as nonsense as local democracy is... more monolithic, more removed from the average person, and infinitely more corrupt.

I'd split the hair a bit finer: the original mandate/aspiration/hope of the UN was to create a world body of adult supervision in the aftermath of WW2. It was crafted by the last breed of the Western politicians for whom 'elitist' wasn't a dirty word (think Churchill, Roosevelt, and their contemporaries). Folks like the aren't so much left vs right as they are patricians vs plebs. And that attitude leads to wanting to control things "for the greater good." The fact that the Internet is successful and effective and is a cash cow but isn't under UN control is just human nature piled on top of the founding principles of the UN.

Not to say the UN is justified in wanting it--I'd sooner hand the internet to the mafia than the UN.

Like any political entity, the primary goal of the UN is to consolidate and centralize power into the hands of the few, rather than decentralize power into the hands of the many.

Let's put it this way. There is X amount of political power available in the world, and Y amount of individuals holding that political power. The UN's goal is to lessen Y while maintaining the same value of X. If you like the sound of that, then you'll be glad to know that they have already made significant progress.

Not a sinle person in government wants to reduce X. Desire to increase one's power over others the primary reason people get involved in government! This is why it's important to give the government the least possible power needed to accomplish your objectives - all power will surely be abused, you can't stop it from being abused, all you can do is give less power to be abused.

If a country has multiple people in some form of power, they will typically expend a decent amount of their resources towards removing power from their rival and granting it to themselves.

Even in countries like the US, where this sort of behavior is somewhat contained by the Constitution, you can still say there is X amount of political available because there are those boundaries set up between the branches. That wouldn't work if each branch had

In their defense, the UN has a very strict policy stating that everyone joining the Human Rights Council must clean the blood off their machetes before entering the Council chambers, and sign a pledge to reduce their raping by at least 50% while serving.

At least we haven't had any World Wars since the UN was founded. There have been also a dramatic decrease in wars between countries. Getting involved in civil wars wasn't the UN's original purpose, but its mission has expended since it has been so successful in preventing other kinds of wars.

At least we haven't had any World Wars since the UN was founded. There have been also a dramatic decrease in wars between countries. Getting involved in civil wars wasn't the UN's original purpose, but its mission has expended since it has been so successful in preventing other kinds of wars.

And by that logic the TSA has a legitimate claim to preventing terrorists from highjacking more planes.

BINGO! World War I started, in part, because in July 1914 Europe had in place an antiquated diplomatic framework that was not up to the task of solving a multilateral crisis. An entire month elapsed between the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of war. Until about the last week of that month, when the Russians mobilized, world war was eminently preventable through diplomacy. The UN and the Washington-Moscow hotline both serve as essential backstops to preventing another World War.

The secret alliances are basically a no no now, and were under the league of nations. The UN acts as a collector of treaties, even though for some reason we don't know where the official border is between Saudi and the Emirates they have a treaty, and it has been filed with the UN for future use.

The UN is also a recognition that there are a lot of very unsavoury people in the world, they're in charge of things, and like it or not they're making decisions. So you may as well give them an official seat at t

Which pretty much shows, that it is impossible to "stop" any large scale conflict by figuring out who is responsible and blaming them. Because the blame game can be played on and on and on, until we reach the beginning of history.

It took WWII to have most of the participants (at least in Europe) realize that putting an end to a conflict is more important than figuring out who is responsible for the conflict. ( And I fear the middle east will only realize that after an equally big bang. )

The UN's post World War I precursor the League of Nations collapsed in complete failure as the Axis powers walked out one by one in the 1930's and it was moth balled when World War II started. The UN inherited many of its agencies and is for all practical purposed the same agency with a new name and a new home. The only reason the UN can claim no world wars on its watch is becaused they changed the name after there was a world war on its watch.

The primary reason there haven't been any world wars since the UN was founded is because there have been nuclear weapons since before the UN was founded, and everyone has a vested interest in not letting wars escalate to the point that they would annihalate civilization as we know it.

The UN's post World War I precursor the League of Nations collapsed in complete failure as the Axis powers walked out one by one in the 1930's

Technically, WW1 and WW2 were the same war, with a 20 year pause for rebuilding.

The UN might not be perfect, and it might not have prevented a new WW on its own. However, it has provided a forum to talk, which is a pre-requisite to not fight. As a result, I can guarantee you that there were less wars than if there were no UN. Heck, even the Balkan area had only one actual war, and that was just everyone telling the locals to stop machine-gunning random people.

Feel free to argue semantics. Yes, the guarantee is not a mathematical proof or scientific certainty of p > 0.95. That's why it is a guarantee, not a proof.

And while we're on sophistic arguments that bring nothing to the table, your argument amounts to a tautology, with an insult thrown in for good measure. Once you get to the real world, you will realize that everyone operates with less than perfect data, and continuously makes decisions based on less than perfect data. In the meantime, keep arguing tha

The UN definitely isn't the reason for no world wars - not even close. For the most part, the NYC-based org is nothing more than a bureaucratic nightmare held together and run by the US and a few other vested interests.

The real reason there haven't been any World Wars since 1945 is that at least two of the world's biggest (and stable) powers/nations has had nuclear weapons (starting in 1947). Notice that the United States hasn't declared war on any country since then? Yes, the US has invaded a few countries in the name of "freedom", but we've never gone toe-to-toe with a nuclear power, and neither has any other nation. Us and the Soviets/Russians? Nope - just a lot of Cold War crap. India/Pakistan? Nothing major since they got into the nuclear club. China? Nothing since Korea (and subsequently getting nukes). Europe - a place of constant wars between first world nations for millenia - is now mostly silent, outside of the occasional, internal racial purge (Balkans, etc.).

Wars today are usually either over oil, religion, race, or about freedom - inside of small, punk regimes with crazy men at the helm.

Now if an UNSTABLE power ever obtained hydrogen bombs, that could change everything, but that's another story. And no UN action is going to stop THEM...

My current political knowledge and world history are insufficient to comment on the exact number of wars that have occurred since 1945, but I'm quite certain it's more than those two. I think perhaps you mis-interpreted the issue as the number of wars the U.S. has been involved in.

And that's not really true. Yes, our executives have recently avoided the legitimacy of getting a declaration of war before mounting a large-scale military invasion of a nation, doing combat with the armed forces of that nation, and ultimately replacing the government of that nation. However, just because they haven't had the integrity to use the word "war" doesn't mean we didn't go to war - it just means our Congress should be upset that its constitutional role was usurped by another branch of government.

Well, it gets all muddled when the people you're going to war with aren't the soldiers of any actual government. We used to have the tradition of a Declaration of War on bandits or pirates, even though there was no particular opposing government, but we've sadly lost that tradition.

But the congress does still (usually) authorize the use of troops, they just hide from putting the words "Declaration of War" in the title of the bill - it's mostly in fact a failing of the congress, and not another branch here,

Well, it gets all muddled when the people you're going to war with aren't the soldiers of any actual government....that I have some issues with.

Now, whatever you want to call the act of going after those types, that's one thing. But when it leads to taking a nation over, that's a war. When you occupy it and gut its government, that's war. When you perform military operations on foreign soil against the will of the sovereign government, that

At the very least you could have looked this up in the 11 seconds it took me. Also, the US accounts for 22% [wikipedia.org] of the UN funding, which is almost twice that of the second biggest contributor (Japan). We were in arrears for not paying the full assessment, not for withholding the full amount. I can't find data on it, but the maximum amount we are quoted to be in arrears on is a little over $1B. That's less than 1/3d of

Exactly. We use it to exert our will over every other nation on earth and then we punish them with sanctions and war if they violate any of the resolutions. When other nations try to use the U.N. to exert their influence over us or hold us to prior agreements, we just ignore them with virtually no consequences. It's a pretty sweet deal.

I do agree with Eric S. "Balkanizing" is a well-chosen expression. The internet as it is has enough self-organization to not be in need of such pseudo-solutions as the proposed UN treaty seems to suggest.

... will be routed around. Regulate DNS and something else will be used. Block IP addresses and new ones will take their place. While governments dictate indefinite ownership of ideas for their corporate owners and prosecute dissent, technology has been pulling society in the other direction. You can outlaw reality, but that doesn't make it go away, anymore than outlawing weeds stops them from growing.

I know that's the going idea, but let's not push the point too far. The Internet isn't P2P over air yet. You still need the resources of major telcos to make it work and major telcos can be bought or controlled. For all that we would like to pretend that's not the case, this is still the Age of the Nation-State.

It may not be the Internet that we know and love today, but an Internet can be controlled or more accurately killed by "gates" being dropped at access points all over the world. It could then be reanimated into a dismembered zombie under the control of governments and major providers.

The reason only places like China and Iran do that today is that no one else has a reason to do it right now, but just wait.

... will be routed around. Regulate DNS and something else will be used. Block IP addresses and new ones will take their place. While governments dictate indefinite ownership of ideas for their corporate owners and prosecute dissent, technology has been pulling society in the other direction. You can outlaw reality, but that doesn't make it go away, anymore than outlawing weeds stops them from growing.

Yep, the people of China, Iran, Saudi Arabia all agree with you - if they get to see your post because of the controls those "enlightened" countries gateways allow. Yes, I know of the Anonymiser software, the proxies and whatnot that allow some technically-able individuals to get outside of their "Great Firewalls", but I for one would not trust an organization that suffers the "UN Human Rights Council" (composed of such freedom loving stalwarts such as China, Cuba, Iran, etc (as well as some rights-respect

The DNS system as it is now, in the not too distant future, I suspect will be viewed as little more than a Racket. Domain registration should be effectively free. There is no justification for the current registration fees (let alone the BLATANT racketeering fees for xxx and toplevel domains).

They aren't the only ones. Verizon does the same thing, and probably others. But its easy to turn off. For TW its an account setting, just google for the info. Verizon has alternate DNS server addresses that don't futz with the results.

For those who suggested using google for DNS - that's just too much for me, no way I want to give them a list of every hostname I am ever interested in.

The DNS system as it is now, in the not too distant future, I suspect will be viewed as little more than a Racket. Domain registration should be effectively free. There is no justification for the current registration fees (let alone the BLATANT racketeering fees for xxx and toplevel domains).

Perhaps, but the DNS requires infrastructure to operate. That infrastructure isn't free.

The costs for the gTLDs are pretty reasonable (roughly $10/year for retail pricing; the registry gets what, maybe $6.50/year out of that?). I'm not sure how much of it actually makes it down to the folks who operate the roots, but they should definitely get some of it (assuming they aren't already). It's not easy running a distributed, global system upon which the entire internet relies and that has had 100% uptime for a

I've said this before and I'll say it again, because people really need to wake up, smell the coffee, and internalize this:

The UN doesn't represent YOU, or any other PERSON. It represents GOVERNMENTS. Governments are their constituents, not humaity.

Let me repeat that: The UN's constituents are GOVERNMENTS, not humanity. If you understand that, you will understand UN policy and why they do things that otherwise seem bizarr or incompetent.

And from the point of view of virtually every government, no matter how "benign" it may appear, the Internet is most certainly broken. Why? Because they cannot easily control it, control the content on it, or control what the people using it see and say. This impacts their ability to govern the way they would like to (and the way they used to) by feeding an official line to the media and have it echoed into every home and automobile, often without much question.

What humanity sees as a working, functioning internet that has democratized information and allowed an unprecedented level of collaboration, cooperation, and exchange of ideas, our governments one and all see as their biggest threat. What better way to reign in that threat than to turn control over to the UN, then agree by treaty how it is to be "governend". What they tried with SOPA and ACTA they'll be able to easily achieve through a simple UN governance mandate.

Sianara Internet, sianara freedom of communication. Welcome your new overlords, same as the olds ones, but with less compunction about smacking you down into place. With perfect political cover to the ostensibly liberal western democracies: to the public: "we regret the UN's decision to implement X, but are bound by treaty to abide their decision. This minor erosion of internet expression won't impact our fundamental freedoms any, and we'll learn to cope", to the Koch brothers (or Soros if you're on the other side of the aisle): "Problem solved. Can I count on your campaign contribution to my superpac next season?" Multiply across every politician, in every political system, in every government, and diversify by whatever means is appropriate to the local political climate, wether it's campaign contributions, secret tribunals, or shells raining down on opposition cities.

The USA does not represent you or your nation and for the informed they know the USA does not represent its own citizens either.SOPA and ACTA will eventually happen somehow as soon as the public drops the ball long enough on the issue for them to sneak it bye; with or without the UN. At least with the UN it will have even more BS to navigate and given how weak the UN is it will probably not have the impact the USA is today messing with people's domains, pushing around foreign officials like puppets etc.

If you chase the authority up the line it goes ICANN --> NTIA --> DoC --> US Congress.

Now, how prepared do you think the US congress is going to be to hand their control of the Internet over to China and Russia?

The ITU has been seeking relevance to the Internet since the 90s; in a world where balancing line voltages is no longer important the ITU's role in international telecommunications has been severely dimini$hed.

If you look at any step of the way, Bob Shaw from the ITU has been running around in secret trying to cover his tracks.

When GE Federal Systems used Alternic and posted it was "as good as if not better" than the legacy root servers, who called from the INTERNATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS UNION IN GENEVA (t SOUNDS so impressive, in real terms, it's as impressive as being, say, the LAN administrator for the White House. Not much global policymaking happens in THAT cubicle) and asked them to stop as this was dangerous? Bob Shaw of the ITU. Oh, and he asked that his name be kept of it ("I didn't say this, I was never here" - Dune). Pity he didn't get the secretary to swear to the same secrecy, she told me who it was. Get used to it, maggots.

Who introduced the Government Advisory Comittee ("GAC") into ICANN as a fait d'accompli, drawn up in secret, who meet in secret but only have an advisory role - except where they insist on policy? DING DING DING - Bob Shaw of the ITU again. I held a quick straw poll on the floor of the first ICANN meeting in Berlin (the neo nazi demostration outside was a nice touch) and 13 out of 1000 people thought the GAC was a good idea - this for an organization that is supposed to "measure and implement community consensus" as its charter. The footage is still around on the Berkman Center servers at Harvard, and I have copies.

Who knew the fix was in an the US goverment had already picked an ICANN an ignored the worlds work via IFWP and bragged about it drunk in DC ? Bob Shaw of the ITU. He still owes me money from smoking all my wifes Virgina Slims from that night too.I don't trust him or the ITU with $10, let along the internet. He doesn't get this openness thing and is instead a remnant of old world secrecy.

At any rate, ICANN only has any authority at all at our leisure. If we type different numbers into special places in our computers they pretty much cease to exist in any operational capacity as the net is edge controlled, not centrally controlled. Everybody with a root password controls a little piece of it, and it grows at the edges.

This UN governance thing has been repeating like an onion sandwich for over a decade now. When the ITU couldn't get the IANA contract it upped the ante to use the UN moniker to try to get everyone in the world to rally behind it. Waste of time, they can be safely ignored. Nobody takes them seriously.

Regulation an issue? How about shifting technology in a direction that is harder to regulate? Get ubiquidous encryption going, and someone needs to work on a shift towards a content-addressible network for dissemination. It shouldn't even be difficult.

You could encode CDA addresses as 'HTTP://fallback-http-server/SHA1HASHCAN/hash/mime/mime/filename' - that way you'd have backwards compatibility, as any browsers not programmed to first ask their local CDA cache node if it has that data would fall back to HTTP. Those that are programmed for it would recognise/SHA1HASHCAN as a special pseudo-directory and query their cache, then every open cache on their network before they tried to HTTP it.

CAN is the solution to so many problems. It'd be substantially harder to censor, substantially harder to trace either source or destination of data, eliminate a lot of congestion-causing demand on the internet infrastructure, be more resilient against faults and dramatically reduce the cost of distributing content ensuring that the individuals and small groups on the internet would be just as able to publish large media files as the big boys who can afford global CDNs.

Yes, I'm rather taken with the idea of a distributed, hash-addressible global public cache right now. Storage is dirt cheap, network capacity isn't.

Governments hate and always have hated the loss of control over their people. A major means of control is control over communication between the masses of people. When the printing press was invented, governments immediately instituted controls. That was not too hard, because printing presses were and still are expensive, as are broadcast stations. Controlling those media outlets is relatively easy because there are so few in comparison to the people on the Internet. Now anyone with a computer and a reasonable Internet connection can make their ideas available to anyone else with an Internet connected gadget. All governments without exception hate this because it lessens their control over their populations.

... is that Google might lose its current degree of influence over governance if that governance isn't in the United States. Google would have far less sway with the ITU than with ICANN and the other U.S.-based agencies. Once again it's the 'selfish voice' masquerading as a 'voice of the people'.

The question people should be asking themselves is if they want someone like Bashar Assad or Mugabe or China or the next Pol Pot regime to have a say in what you can and can't do on the internet. Because as soon as you bring it to the UN you give equal footing to regimes that shouldn't have any say. Just like when Kadaffi's Libya was in charge of the UN commission on Human Rights.

The ultimate threat to the Internet is not governments, it's corporations. If a government tries to twist or shape or censor the Internet, there will always be ways around it and in the end, citizens and even other countries and their citizens will bring down the plans of such regimes.

But when corporations take something over, it's gone for good. There will be no Tor, no darknet.

Even with their armies and weapons, governments are much weaker than corporations. Because ultimately, those armies are made up of people, and the ones holding those weapons are people. But there are no tools for people to fight off or take down corporations once they have reached a certain level of power. Finally, the decisions in a corporation are made not by the people who work for the corporation, or even the owners, but by the legal virtual entity that is required to only seek greater shareholder value. Even if the shareholders, or board of directors, or C-level officers decide they want to assign some social good a slightly greater weight in the corporate decision-making process, the corporation is designed to ignore them and only to seek greater shareholder value. No "free market" mechanisms exist that allow for the power of corporations to be reigned in. And now we have shares of corporations owned by other corporations, so there are layers and layers of decision gates that only respond to greater share value. We have corporations that are worth more than all but about 10% of world governments. What possible defense does a country, even a democracy, have against such a single-minded golem that only knows how to feed endlessly.

Greater regulation may well be the last line of defense against a corporate takeover of the Internet. Really, of the world. But it's a small window that's closing. And the wealth of those corporations is being used to obfuscate, confuse, disarm and distract.

It's a shame the United Nations is so weak. So corrupt. The solution is not to regulate the Internet, but to regulate the corporations.

In the rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock of social power, corporations crush everything.

The more power you let the government take from you ("to regulate the evil corporations, we promise, this time for sure!"), the more power you give those corporations with their hands already on the steering wheel.

That's why I believe the best approach to tyrannical corporate power is asymmetrical warfare waged by organized individuals. I ma

Am I the only one who senses that China/Russia are pushing for UN control of the internet because the US overstepped its bounds by enforcing its shitty copyright laws beyond its borders with domain seizures? We need to stop this, and before that happens we may need to force the US government to guarantee that it won't mess with internet infrastructure any more...

Google has deep pockets, and has been known to do good things for their own sake (no, I don't buy the whole "don't be evil" thing, but there's a decent track record there) Setup or fund existing mesh networking systems to allow a grassroots network (with a new name) that is decentralized completely. I know research is going on in this area for a variety of reasons, put more brains and money on it and make it happen. "Work toward saying to the UN: You can have the Internet, we're done with it now."

I'm sorry but a citizen in my country has read and been offended by your first post. In our culture first posts are the devil and are treated as such. We are contacting your government to arrange extradition into the Holy Court.

As someone who has watched as youtube, controlled by google last I heard, has slowly whittled away at these supposed freedoms (this birdsong is copyright douchebag corp, your video offends a muslim in malaysia and has been taken offline, your video offends the catholic clergy and has been removed, etc), I find this deliciously ironic.Clean up your own house first, Schmidt.

As someone who has watched as youtube, controlled by google last I heard, has slowly whittled away at these supposed freedoms (this birdsong is copyright douchebag corp, your video offends a muslim in malaysia and has been taken offline, your video offends the catholic clergy and has been removed, etc), I find this deliciously ironic.Clean up your own house first, Schmidt.

I agree with your point, but I think you have it backwards.

Google is a global private company. The simple fact that Google is "forced" to obey the laws of China if it wishes to operate there is actually a perfect example of Schmidt's point. Currently China has power over Google, but little power over the global internet itself.

He's basically trying to prevent the internet from following in Toutube's footsteps.

It's a stupid mistake of an automated algorithm. You can blame google for this, but essentially it's a more complex version of the old "sudo nohup rm -Rf/" paste. Apparently google seems to think that the uploaded videos can't be watched by actual people, that'd be too pricey. So if you want to have a free youtube, mistakes like this will be part of the experience. Imho, they're doing pretty fucking well at this.

The problem with the birdsong issue was not that the automated system picked it up, it was that the video poster protested the take down, Rumblefish reviewed the claim and still declared themselves to be the holder of the birdsong copyright:

Everyone loves to be free. But everyone is also impacted by the actions of their neighbors. Therefore, everyone has an incentive to prevent their neighbors from taking actions that one dislikes. So, everyone has an incentive to deny freedom to their neighbors.

The Internet is a shining example of great freedom, and hence great resistence.

Should you be free to murder me? Obviously not.Should you be free to post lies about me, visible to the entire world, which motivate people to act in a way that harms me? Probably not. But that rule is *very* hard to enforce without also infringing on other things you *should* be free to do (whether I like it or not).

Exactly; murder is inappropriate in today's society. However you shouldn't be sent to jail for 30 years for thinking about murder.

Well, the context of a "hate crime" is exactly that - punishing someone for what they are thinking. Perhaps 30 years is not the right number, but if you think about killing a minority you are indeed committing a hate crime. Today they may wait until you commit a few more crimes before they prosecute you, but this doesn't change the fact that it is a crime.

I believe that when murder is combined with "hate crime" in some states this makes you eligible for the death penalty.

This is vastly incorrect. Hate crimes are based not merely about committing a crime, but about committing crimes while thinking certain thoughts. In essence, it is your intention that matters. You aren't being punished for just thinking something, but for thinking those things and having certain reasons for committing your crime. We judge certain crimes by the intentions behind them all the time, as with manslaughter vs murder. A hate crime is no different.

The fact is, We the People of the United States of America were first to fund DNS that makes the Internet what it is today. Sorry UN, you can't take it over without paying off some of the national debt your members hold.

That doesn't even make sense. DNS is only a small part of the internet and it's not owned in the sense of property in any case.

Besides DNS as implemented is wrong and easily abused by governments ( like the US and UK do ) and anyone who can fake a signature ( like that whole sex.com thing ). Something distributed like namecoin's.bit top level domain would be far better than the current get rich quick scheme.

What a horribly naive and ignorant statement. European research funding and a Brit invented the web, does that mean they should control the web?

What's debt got to do with anything anyway? It's the US and nations most closely aligned to it that hold far and away the majority of the world's debt whilst those nations in the UN whom the US sees as enemies such as China that hold far and away the largest surpluses. Bringing debt into it makes no sense as the US has far more than anyone else. Sorry if these facts upset your ignorant nationalist world view though.

The fact is, We the People of the United States of America were first to fund DNS that makes the Internet what it is today. Sorry UN, you can't take it over without paying off some of the national debt your members hold.

Well thank you for inventing the web, but nothing stops other regions from having their own ICANN and cross-syncing DNS root servers. The standard is what people use, right?

There is NOTHING stopping you from setting up a DNS root and running your own DNS system. Go ahead and do it. I don't care. No one else here cares. In fact, not a single person in the World cares. The US won't stop you. They won't even try. Hell, they won't even notice!

Yeah, I was going to post something sorta like that, but you did it first, so thanks! We should be pointing this out whenever DNS's problems come up.

I've worked on a number of projects for which we created our own "root" servers, and added them to the appropriate file in all our systems. It worked fine, and nobody outside our project even noticed.

It's also common for organizations with an internal network (10.*.*.* or 192.168.*.* or whatever) to set up a bunch of internal "root" servers the same way.

This is a hard truth, but it must be said. The world at large is simply not evolved enough for the Internet. Most of Asia and almost all of the middle east are less able to appreciate the ideals of freedom and tolerance. I say this as an Indian whose government is very keen on controlling what's said on the Internet.

Despite the US's flaws, the first amendment is the strongest protection of free expression in the world. It's an achievement of mankind which the rest of the world is actually just not good enough to appreciate. The Internet is in truth something better than what we humans in our current state of evolution deserve. If you hand it over to the UN, it will become something we actually deserve at this moment in time...and that's not a pretty thing.

We accidentally stumbled upon the Internet as it is today. If people had seen it coming, it would never have been allowed to become what it is. But now that it's here, we have to protect it and treasure it because we've been blessed with something that's too good for us. The UN will reverse that and make it just average since all over unevolved countries will have a say in it.

I'm pretty sure the U.S. is currently seizing domain names on a regular basis, shutting down web sites and free speech, with absolutely no due process, and was recently well on its way to codifying this practice in law with SOPA/PIPA. They were killed but the DHS is still seizing domains like they were law.

The U.S. is also aggressively push ACTA on governments around the globe, often using blackmail, which can also be used to suppress free speech.

Especially since 9/11 the U.S. simply hasn't been the bastion of free speech you are trying to make it sound like.

Turning the Internet over to the UN would probably be bad for a host of reasons, but its quite obvious that the U.S. isn't even remotely trust worthy any more thanks to America's two pronged obsessions stopping piracy at all costs, including basic civil liberties, and to a lesser extent obsessing over Islamic extremism and terrorism.

All things considered I would prefer Internet control were passed to a country like Switzerland with a strong history of neutrality, resonable though not perfect free speech laws and a track record of supporting international agencies. It would be a better choice than either the U.S. or the U.N.

> Despite the US's flaws, the first amendment is the strongest protection of free expression in the world.

Is it? I mean it's fairly decent and all, and maybe it is even the best in theory (although I didn't compare US law to any of the other ~200 countries that exist) but given the fact that the US are hardly even near the top of lists such as the Press Freedom Index, perhaps it doesn't really work all that well in practice.

It's not, an organisation requiring international consensus is not going to be able to pull off controversal decisions because you'd never get that consensus.

Many years ago, when WIPO was created it swayed towards much more relaxed IP laws than we have currently, this is because African nations wanted things like medicine and technology to come down in price faster so that their countries could experience benefits of western society sooner. The US didn't like the fact it got outvoted so side-stepped WIPO and created the WTO which is less democratic so that it could try and force international IP policies to go it's way. This is evidenced in the fact the US uses a lot of weight to try and force nations into the WTO, to force them to accept WTO rulings against them, yet has largely ignored WTO rulings against it on issues such as lumber, steel, cotton, gambling and so forth.

If the internet was in international hands you'd never get the domain seizures authorised that the US currently allows as you'd never get the political support for what is a US agenda. Similarly though you'd never get Chinese style censorship as there are too many nations that would be against it.

Technical issues would still be resolved just as well, because when technical issues arise there's really little political need or desire to hijack the issue and prevent a resolution passing - things like that are purely technical.

So all in all it'd be a much better situation than the current status quo where the US unilaterally imposes censorship on the internet based on it's ethnocentric vision of gambling and IP law.

Really, for the most part the only people who want it to stay in the US are American nationalists, xenophobes, and those with a vested interest in retaining the power it affords. There's a few folk in between who are ignorant about the UN and don't realise that it's far more than just the security council and that it already handles other international tasks like international mailing, maritime rules, air transport rules, telecomms and so forth perfectly well without any such drama that Schmidt is peddling.

This doesn't even make sense. What is the "Internet" that should be in UN hands? IP allocations? DNS roots? RFC process? Well-known port allocations? It seems, from most posts, that DNS is the target. If so, let the UN go ahead and create its own hierarchy and administer it. No one will stop them! Or are you also suggesting that the World be forced to use UN DNS servers over the existing collection?